Tuesday 26 June 2012

GamesReport: 22-Jun-12 QCon19-Day 1

It's taken me a few days to recover and catch up on my sleep, but as QCon closes for another year, the KoffeeKlub look back on an epic weekend of top notch gaming!

Friday @ QCon19


Zombie Dice
Coffees in hand we found ourselves a quiet little space in the corner for a few rounds of Zombie Dice, a recent purchase for Mr Bingers, having played it last weekend during the TTN event at Nerdtopia.

Zombie Dice is a light press-your-luck style game similar to the older Pass The Pigs or Can't Stop in that you are trying to advance your score (eat brains in this case) before your luck runs out and you lose what progress you've already made (getting shot three times). It ranks quite poorly on the geek but still served us well at QCon as an opener and a few times over the weekend as we waited for our food to arrive during lunch/dinner breaks.

Next up, having seen quite a few plays at our regular KoffeeKlub meetings, was Bluff (aka Liars Dice or the dice game played in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest).

Bluff goes all the way up to eleven!
We had pulled together two full sets and wanted to open with a Mega game to get our QCon off to a good start. People were slow to join us in the beginning, but cries of "World Record Muff!" seemed to do the trick and eventually we went all the way up to eleven!

Trying to predict how many 4s there were with 50+ dice being rolled proved tricky, so we followed our record-breaking match with a couple of six-player tournament games.

Great craic all round!


Tensions rise during the Bluff Final!
Trev - our dealer
Our first meaty game for the evening was AEG's Nightfall hosted for us by Trev from his own private collection. In Nightfall you take control of various vampires, werewolves, and ghouls and try to deal damage to your opponents in the form of wound cards which then clog-up their deck.

Vampires and Werewolves and Ghouls
I always enjoy this one, especially when we play with one of the expansions, it can be tough to learn for newbies though and we had a couple with us for this game.





Ideally players need a game or two before they really begin to understand what to look for in the card-combos.

Bah!
Our final offering for the evening was Pandemic, a co-operative game where the players are highly skilled CDC specialists working as a team to stop several virulent diseases as they sweep across the world. We'd played this one recently and failed in our efforts to save mankind... Would QCon be the turning point? ...hell no...... In fact we would fail in multiple attempts throughout the weekend to beat the game.

My only purchase at QCon was the expansion to Pandemic, On The Brink. We've provisionally agreed not to play this until we've beaten the base game first. Hmm...



All-in-all a great opening to QCon19 for the KoffeeKlub. By close on Friday we were tired, but still looking forward to a great weekend of gaming.

Watch out for Saturday's GameReport coming soon to the KoffeeKlub blog.

4 comments:

  1. Missed you guys, and to think I was five foot away on Friday nite.

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  2. Aww, that's a shame! :( We kind of got carried away with non-stop gaming over the w/e. I've never before spent so little time in the trader's hall. We should try to arrange something more definite for your next visit to Belfast. :)

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  3. Shame we didn't meet up. We did see a few boardgame groups at the convention and it does seem that there is somewhat in a resurgence in this style of game. Perhaps we can organise some sort of national tournament or something :)

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  4. Friday's Bluff mini tournament was a suitably epic way to start the convention experience. We were quite noisy I guess and the rattling dice and slamming cups on tabletops brought a lot of interest to our tables. We had twelve participants for the tournament on two tables and a final round of three of the best from each table. GaryG and AndyA of the Koffeeklub were surprise winners though there was stiff competition from our new convention friends

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